Stuff The President Said Today

In which the president oversells the bad deal that is the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The president got on the horn with some reporters today and escalated the argument he's having with Senator Professor Warren and his progressive base over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This has become quite the hooley indeed.

"The one that gets on my nerves the most is the notion that this is a 'secret' deal," Obama said. "Every single one of the critics who I hear saying, 'this is a secret deal,' or send out emails to their fundraising base saying they're working to prevent this secret deal, can walk over today and read the text of the agreement. There's nothing secret about it."

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In fact, there's been a lot that's secret about it ever since the negotiations began. It was negotiated behind closed doors, and for reasons that benefited nobody except large corporations and the politicians, dictators, and provincial satraps who do their bidding. (The fact we know much of anything at all is because the good folks at WikiLeaks threw some of the treaty out into the world, which is hardly a proof that the TPP isn't a "secret" deal. WikiLeaks doesn't do a lot of work with stuff that's in the public domain.) The congressional opportunities that the president is referring to are limited, and there's no good reason for that, either.

"When I listen to criticism of this deal, what I primarily hear is criticism of NAFTA," Obama said. "If you don't like the fact that labor provisions aren't enforceable right now, why wouldn't you want a trade deal that makes labor provisions enforceable with some of the same countries we currently trade with?"

The NAFTA labor provisions were supposed to be enforceable, too. How'd that work out? Most of it was smoke and mirrors and nonsense. As John MacArthur writes in his book about the selling of "free trade," even Al Gore's famous trouncing of Ross Perot in their televised debate over NAFTA was based primarily on what the Reverend Ike used to call "pie in the sky by and by when you die." MacArthur expanded on that in an interview with Bill Moyers in 2007:

No, because it's just like the NAFTA side agreements in the '90s. They guaranteed all sorts of things in the side agreements: labor rights, environmental protection in Mexico. And none of it got done. Virtually none of it got done. Now, in these agreements, they're saying that these countries are suddenly going to start respecting labor rights. That countries like Peru, which can only survive by selling us their cheap labor. In other words, that's all they've got-- are going to raise their labor standards that would kill the very justification for set-- for setting up a factory in Peru. It's the same thing in Mexico. It's the same thing in China.

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History insists that the only reason to believe that the TPP will be any different in this regard is if you trust the president who's currently peddling the old moonshine. And the notion that we get to see all of this monstrosity only after the Congress gives the president the power to zip it through unchanged is something of an exercise in kabuki democracy.

"I'm not adverse to continuing to engage with members of Congress or unions or anybody else in the progressive community about how we can make sure this is the strongest agreement possible," Obama concluded. "But what I am adverse to is a bunch of ad hominem attacks and misinformation that stirs up the base but ultimately doesn't serve them well. And I'm going to be pushing back very hard if I keep on hearing that."

It takes some big clanging brass ones to complain about ad hominem attacks after you've essentially just called SPW and others liars. But, more curiously, after spending six years taking all manner of distasteful and racist abuse on everything from his legislative agenda to the circumstances of his birth with amazing equanimity, the president decides that this is the issue on which he will not tolerate ad hominem attacks? That's just weird. The president has got to understand that the country has heard this before, that it has swallowed enough snake oil to gag a python, and that it is righteously skeptical of any deal this big that is being sold so hard by so many people who have proven that they do not have the best interests of most Americans at heart. That's not ad hominem. Them's the facts.

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